TANZANIA'S National Social Security Fund (NSSF) will this week embark on a countrywide crackdown on employers who do not remit employees' contributions to the pension fund, a contravention of the NSSF Act, 1997.

The NSSF public relations manager, Mr Frank Maduga, told The EastAfrican last week that the crackdown was expected to start on Monday this week when NSSF inspectors would scrutinise records of all employers, including diplomatic missions. 

"The crackdown targets all unregistered employers and employees; those who do not contribute fully and those who deduct salaries from their employees but fail to remit the money to NSSF," he said. 

Mr Maduga said that the thrust of the exercise would be in Dar es Salaam, where most major employers are based.

"This time we have decided to change our inspectors, because some of them have been colluding with certain employers," Mr Maduga said. 

The number of private employers in Tanzania has grown greatly in the past decade because of privatisation of the nearly 400 parastatals that were the country's main employers. 

According to the NSSF Act, any person who contravenes the Act is liable to a fine not exceeding Tsh100,000 ($104) or imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or both. 

However, some observers have said that the fines are too lenient on defaulters. They suggest that the fines or term of imprisonment be raised in order to arrest the situation. 

The EastAfrican has discovered that most defaulting employers in Dar es Salaam falsify records of salaries and allowances paid as well as of the number of employees, which translates into smaller contributions to the pension fund. While some workers take home upward of Tsh300,000 ($310), their pension deductable amount could be half of that. 

According to sources, most of the defaulting employers have in recent days been engaging workers from India, Pakistan, Mauritius and Somalia, whom they do not pay. These workers are made to live in warehouses with their only pay being food and accommodation. "They do not have any work permits and residence documentation," said one source.

Other employers do not remit employees' contributions on the pretext that the employees are hired on a "temporary basis" while the NSSF Act stipulates that even temporary employees fall under the NSSF Act, said Mr Maduga. 

"We have discovered that some companies had only 20 per cent of staff on the permanent payroll. In other words, such an employer might be cheating or doing something sinister in order to exploit his staff," he said.

On diplomatic missions, the NSSF source said that it had been discovered that most embassies did not contribute to the fund.

"But we find it difficult to take them to court as most of the time the government intervenes under the pretext that they enjoy diplomatic immunity," said the source, adding that such a practice was against the laws of the host country. 

Recently, it was reported that four diplomatic missions, Libya, Iran, Syria and Sudan were not remitting workers' contributions to the NSSF as the law requires. Some had been in the country for more than 40 years but had never contributed to the Fund. However, it was not clear how NSSF would tackle the diplomatic immunity issue. 

According to the NSSF Act, an employee "is any person who is employed in Mainland Tanzania under any contract of service or apprenticeship with an employer, whether by way of manual labour, clerical work or otherwise and however paid." 

It also defines an employee as "a person who is permanently resident in Mainland Tanzania and is employed outside Mainland Tanzania under a contract of service with an employer in Mainland Tanzania by whom he is paid." 

The NSSF, which replaced the National Provident Fund (NPF), is a compulsory scheme that covers all employees in the private sector and NGOs.